What’s New at Snow Software: July 2023
Another batch of new features and innovations rolls out from Snow Software, including two public betas within Snow Cloud Cost and more. Read on for a summary of this month’s product advances.
Cutting-edge anomaly detection (public beta)
With Snow Cloud Cost, now you can uncover hidden cost inefficiencies and optimize financial performance. The anomaly detection capability marks a significant advancement in cost data analysis and financial management. By automating the detection of cost irregularities, you can:
- Proactively identify inefficiencies
- Prevent revenue leakage
- Unlock opportunities for cost optimization
The anomaly detection monitoring provides an overview of anomalies and anomaly alerts, enabling users to view historical alerts/anomalies and trends, in addition to exporting the data into CSV.
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Prometheus agent (public beta)
The Prometheus agent will enable us to ingest metrics from your Kubernetes clusters more efficiently and will only scrape metrics from a predefined set provided as part of the installation. The agent can be further customized according to your individual business requirements.
- The agent queries the data on an hourly basis by default (the interval is configurable).
- Queries execute in batches and aggregate the hourly metrics data.
- The agent can query data for multiple clusters from a single Prometheus or Thanos agent.
It’s now easier to track Kubernetes waste
Kubernetes (K8s) is an important area of focus for cloud financial management, and we’re committed to delivering best-in-class K8s FinOps features. Recent enhancements include:
- AWS, Azure, K8s cost & usage explorers: The cost breakdown table now displays CPU actual/waste and a memory actual/waste breakdown.
- AWS, GCP, Azure, K8s cost & usage Explorers: CPU/memory request metric has been replaced with the CPU/memory waste metric.
- AWS, K8s cost & usage explorers: Cost breakdown table data can be grouped by node group level.
Microsoft Azure virtual machine and storage cost breakdown report
Gain a comprehensive view of your Azure costs by seeing the total virtual machine (VM) cost and storage cost in a single dashboard. This holistic approach allows you to evaluate the overall impact of VMs and storage on your cloud expenses, enabling better cost optimization strategies.
Container visibility now available on Snow Atlas
Containers are isolated environments, which makes gathering information about how they’re being used or the software and applications residing in them extremely inefficient using traditional technologies (agents). As a result, software asset managers have a blind spot in calculating their effective compliance position for commercial applications running in these environments.
To help software asset management (SAM) pros solve this challenge, Snow released a new feature in Snow Spend Optimizer on Snow Atlas that provides visibility to software running in Kubernetes environments. Current supported environments include Kubernetes on-premises, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Google Kubernetes Service & OpenShift.
The container visibility feature:
- Scans the container environment to identify if there are commercial products that need a license. This feature scans for commercial applications in standard containers for Microsoft, RedHat and Oracle. A standard container is a container that has been acquired from a repository of these vendors and has not been modified after that.
- Provides details on what kind of license is required to be compliant. SAM pros need some historical insight on when applications were deployed (start/end times) within containerized environments, so they know exactly when a compliance vulnerability may have started.
Snow Atlas webpage UI and performance updates
We recently released updates to the Snow Atlas pages for inventoried computers, the identified applications and license management. The new pages are fast, responsive and dynamically scalable for various screen sizes. Our performance tests show that search time has improved to find applications in just one second.
Improved Snow Atlas navigation
We love to hear from our customers and to learn ways to improve our products. One piece of feedback we received from several customers was that moving the secondary menu to the left side led to some space constraints. To address this issue, we’ve made the secondary menu collapsible. This update is available to all Snow Atlas customers.
Managed service partners (MSPs) can see and control access to Snow Atlas
For Snow partners who manage their customers’ SAM environments (customers buy through a partner and grant full access to the partner), our latest release allows partner administrators to see which of their customer systems they can sign into and access.
For these MSP administrators with full control, they can also extend or prevent access to other users. These latest features allow partners to identify gaps in servicing their customers as well as prevent any unauthorized access to the customer systems.
What’s next?
The What’s New section on the Snow Atlas homepage will now include Snow Atlas release notes, so you can always stay on top of the latest innovations. We have more product updates and innovations coming across Snow, so be sure to subscribe to our blog, so you don’t miss a thing.
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